Josimar Medina woke a little before 9am on Wednesday to find himself airborne and hurtling through his carriage on the fast train from Madrid to Seville.
“I remember flying through the air and looking for my girlfriend, who was also shooting through the air,” said Medina, a 37-year-old tourist from the northern Peruvian city of Chiclayo.
Once he landed, he looked around and realised just how lucky he and his girlfriend, Vitoria Maia, had been.
“I saw people with cuts, people covered in blood, people missing limbs, and I saw one person who had nothing left below the chest,” said Medina. “I saw people with their heads crushed and people with mutilated arms.”
The Peruvian stood recounting the details of Wednesday’s deadly rail crash, in which at least 68 people were killed and dozens more were injured, wearing a light brown T-shirt stained with the blood of a young American man he had helped move to safety.
Medina and Maia had been in the seventh carriage of the state-operated Renfe train that smashed into the back of a train run by the private Iryo company on the same line from the capital to the south of Spain. Had they been any further forward, they could well have been among the accident’s fatalities.
As it was, the couple climbed out of the train and helped the injured while they waited for medics and Guardia Civil officers to arrive at the scene of the crash, which took place amid vineyards and olive groves near the small town of Urda in the central region of Castilla-La Mancha, near the city of Toledo.
Within hours of the crash, Urda had been transformed into a frantic emergency response centre, with a local sports centre pressed into service as a triage post for the walking wounded. Cars, vans and trucks from the emergency services in Castilla-La Mancha and neighbouring Madrid crowded the streets.
Fredrich and Arabella Barilea, a couple from the Philippines who now live in Dubai, were on the Iryo train, and Fredrich was sent flying by the impact.
“One guy was shouting: ‘Get out! Get out! Another train could hit!” said Fredrich. “We saw all the people were also getting off. Many of them had head injuries and were covered in blood. We just got as far away from the train as we could.”
Eventually, buses arrived to ferry the lightly injured survivors to Urda – although the Barileas said they were too shocked and confused to know where exactly they had been brought.
“It all happened in a split second,” said Arabella. “The table we were sitting at just disappeared in the crash. I feel like we’re on our second life. You never know what could happen. We’re very grateful.”
Around the couple, people queued patiently on the street as they waited to board coaches. Wearing torn and bloodstained clothes and, in some cases, bandages on their heads, they stared, mute and uncomprehending. Spain may have been in mourning, as the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said during his visit to Urda, but many of those fortunate enough to survive Spain’s second major rail crash in less than a year were still too deep in shock to begin grieving.
Ata Yelkaya, a young tourist from Turkey, usually takes the bus when he travels around Spain. On Wednesday, however, he had decided to try the Iryo. Sleepy and assuming his train had come to a halt at a station, he had switched off his tablet and pulled up his hood in preparation for a nap. At 8.53am, he felt what he would later learn was the impact of the Renfe train smashing into the carriages behind him.
“I woke up with a bump and hit my head on the seat in front of me,” he said, “I looked across at an elderly couple near me and saw that the woman had a cut in her eyebrow. That’s when I knew something serious had happened.”
When he looked out of the window, he saw the carriages behind his – carriage No 5 – had come off the track and that many people had been killed or injured.
“Everyone was in shock but I tried to help other people get off the train,” he said. “I’m from Turkey and I lived through the 2023 earthquake there, so I stayed calm and tried to think about what to do and how to get out. It was only when I got out and saw some of the dead people that it hit me. I think everyone was in shock; too shocked even to panic or to scream.”
Wednesday’s disaster stirs memories of the Adamuz rail crash in January, in which 46 people died. Once again, a small town has found itself at the centre of a national disaster and, once again, local people have rallied to help, bringing food and water to a hall that had been set up as a centre for those searching for their relatives.
But, as also happened at Adamuz, the solidarity and kindness on display is likely to turn to anger over the coming hours as people seek answers as to how one of Europe’s most modern and extensive high-speed rail networks could experience two deadly collisions that have between them claimed at least 114 lives in the space of just 10 months. With a snap general election just a month away, many voters could use their votes to register their fury over another rail disaster. The “inexplicable circumstances” that led to the crash – as Spain’s transport minister has called them – will need to be explained as swiftly and thoroughly as possible.
For all the rush to action and unity on display, there was also a sickening sense of deja vu. One woman from Urda, who had spent the morning driving people to town from the crash site, had few words to describe what she had seen and heard.
“Mejor no verlo,” she said – “it’s better not to see something like this”. Again.
